Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Creativity in a bento box

Peach coloured skies with purple clouds. Crimson
grass. Orange elephants and magenta seals. Nikki goes through a sheaf of A4
size sheets of paper, filling them up with a plethora of vibrant colours. We are at an
art workshop for kids and I’m accompanying Nikki as she experiments with finger
paint (so squishy!) and painting on different mediums (can I start painting
your bed after we go home?). There’s another little boy seated next to us who
seems concerned about Nikki’s artwork.

“The sky is not
that colour” he whispers to his mother in obvious anguish. “The grass is not red.”

The mother hisses something back at him and he
subsides temporarily.

The workshop facilitator hands out fresh sheets of
paper; this time with line drawings on them, and jars filled with fat crayons
which Nikki grabs with glee. It’s a picture of a house with a fence and a garden.
Nikki deliberates between the finger paint and the crayons, makes up her paint
and smears paint liberally across the picture. Strokes of paint fill up the
house and the garden; an indigo roof, green walls, yellow grass. The little boy cannot contain himself anymore. He
abandons his own drawing and is at our side in a trice.

“No, not like that!" he chides Nikki “You have to
draw inside the lines! You will get a red mark. Sky is blue, grass is green!”

His mother pulls him away before I can reply and
rebukes him thoroughly for not concentrating on his work.

She turns to me with a tight smile “She cannot
colour inside the lines?” pointing at Nikki.

“I’ve never asked her to” I smile back.

I did give Nikki a colouring book once; she had been
gifted a Winnie the Pooh one for her birthday and given that Pooh threatened to
overtake our theme for home décor during those days I thought she might like
it. She didn’t. She never actually took to colouring within the lines,
preferring instead to fill up reams of blank paper with her artwork instead. And fill
them up she did, astonishing me sometimes with the creativity and imagination
only children possess.

She draws the rain and butterflies, families of fish
and music. One side of our fridge is filled with renditions of tea parties in
the clouds and the moon taking care of her baby. We don’t really miss colouring
within the lines much.

I know that Nikki is asked to colour within the lines
sometimes at the preschool she goes to, and from the activity sheets I am taken
through at PTMs I know she can do it perfectly well if she wants to. But I also
know that she does not enjoy it, preferring the freedom a blank sheet of paper
offers instead.

We are lucky to have found a preschool that encourages
creativity among its children. There are no red marks for drawing. Purple skies
are encouraged, as are pink elephants and geese with polka dots. But I know
there are a lot of parents who don’t like this approach, preferring instead the
more traditional one of teaching
kids that the grass can only be green and colour is best used within boundaries
and not splayed all over the paper. Just last week I overheard a mother complaining
about how sand play needs to be structured with kids being given specific
instructions on what to do with their spades and buckets rather than just being
left loose in the sand pit; and another parent of a boy in the nursery class
lamenting how his child is not being taught how to write yet. I listened to
them talk and felt a little worried. And then I read the morning papers, all
about artist Aseem Trivedi being arrested for displaying ‘too much creativity’
and felt positively scared. Aside from the misuse of a colonial era law or the growing
intolerance in the political and social environment, what is equally alarming
is the judgement that is so carelessly thrown on an individual’s creative
expression. Who decides what is too creative? Or too little? Are there measures
defined to judge how much is 'too creative' or lines and boxes that it can be fitted into? Are we looking at a
future where our preschoolers go for sandpit class, learning precise
co-ordination of spade with bucket and move on to postgraduate in fine arts
which clearly specifies what is too creative and what is not? The curbs on our creativity
grow deep roots. Our educational system has traditionally been one based on rote
and memorization rather than independent thought or creativity. There are firm boundaries
that are drawn when we are very young and we grow up learning to live within
them. And when some of us think or speak differently, it can create a lot of
discomfort.

Nikki in the meantime has moved on to caricatures
and is busy sketching portraits. A gargoyle-ish figure with pointy hair is me,
I am told. One vaguely resembling Suppandi is our cook. Her father is a
dignified looking turnip.

“We will put these up on the fridge” I tell her.

“Okay but not this one. This one is too nice and
this one is horrible. Put this, it is just right.”

Creativity really is that simple, and it doesn’t
take a three year to show us that. Let the artists define their own boundaries.